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Thursday, February 02, 2006

PEJ News - C. L. Cook - It’s okay when Wal-Mart takes advantage of China’s prison labour; alright when Microsoft allows its environmental standards sink, like so much heavy metal, to the levels of the “developing world” countries hosting its manufacturing; no problemo! when Cisco Systems develops software better able to aid and abet the imprisonment of cyber-dissenters; these companies never pretended to be anything but bottom-line, corporate bottom feeders. But, it’s another story when Google, they of the famous ‘Don’t Do Evil’ motto, turn to the Dark Side...

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Google Does EvilC. L. Cook

PEJ NewsFebruary 2, 2006

We're recently enough arrived in the Technological Age that the very mention of the T-word is enough to send those inhabiting the crustier segments of the demographic pie into either panicked flight, or yawning paroxysms; but whether awed by technology’s whiz-bangery, or deadened by the tedium of techno-babble, Google’s burgeoning bad press regarding its policies in China are raising old questions; questions vital to the shape and nature of not only the future of China’s nascent technological society, but the societies we'll all inhabit tomorrow.

Being Googlers means striving toward the highest possible standard of ethical business conduct. This is a matter as much practical as ethical; we hire great people who work hard to build great products, but our most important asset by far is our reputation as a company that warrants our users' faith and trust. That trust is the foundation upon which our success and prosperity rests, and it must be re-earned every day, in every way, by every one of us. – Google Code of Conduct

For those who don’t follow the exploits of corporate tech. giants: Yahoo, Microsoft, Cisco, and most recently, search engine megalith Google, have all set up shop in China. That’s “Red” China for those old enough to remember the name of Ronald Reagan’s Vice President. (For those young enough to know who R. Kelly is; “Red” refers to Communism: Please google “Cold War”). Back in Reagan’s day, communism, as practiced in Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea was simply referred to as ‘The Evil Empire.’ You might say it comprised a kind of “axis” that stood four-square against the virtues the then “Free World” so passionately espoused: Freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom of thought and expression, and the freedom to fully participate in the political process.

China’s exception from righteous condemnation as an equally evil member of the communist “Axis Powers” was not due to any inherent virtue found within their particular application of Marxist-Leninism, (if anything, China was then, and continues today to be, one of the most brutal, repressive, and regressive regimes the world has ever known), but rather courtesy of Richard Nixon’s ministrations. China was redeemed through its willingness to embark on a journey of discovery into world trade and “free” market capitalism. Considering it’s guides, the ever slimy Tricky Dick and his Igor, moral troglodyte Henry Kissinger, it’s unsurprising the journey would inevitable prove a road to hell.

Along for the Ride

Our informal corporate motto is "Don't be evil." We Googlers generally relate those words to the way we serve our users – as well we should. But being "a different kind of company" means more than the products we make and the business we're building; it means making sure that our core values inform our conduct in all aspects of our lives as Google employees. - Google Code of Conduct

Little has changed. Google has, in decided to assist China's repression, simply joined the chorus of corporations enabling the new fascism. Today, Google joins corporations and governments conducting the most vile operations in China and around the world without feeling the need to coat their dastardliness with even the merest patina of good intent. Not even for “public consumption,” as Google includes in its manifesto of Enlightened Corporatism. They believe the public doesn’t give a damn. And, why shouldn’t they?

We, the public have come, in a few short decades, from a power that could bring down an industry with outraged indignation at the way workers were treated, to a tacit partner in crimes too great to fathom. While we are mostly all aware of some of the more grotesque aspects of the current Chinese regime: The repression in Tibet; a rapine attitude toward the environment; the repression of the Falun Gong; Tiananmen Square; slave labour; domestic economic injustice; the hypocrisy and destruction of the ideals of the revolution; but, what's really important surrounds us. How far need any of we look to find some product, either overt, or embedded within some other product, without seeing the trademark sealing our collective damnation: Made in China?

So, why should Google be any different?

What’s so insidious, Google may argue, when placed beside the billions of gallons of toxic effluents daily destroying the land, sea, and air of not only China, but the world, about putting a few filters on the information accessible to the Chinese people? Of its new service in China, Google contends they’re doing nothing more than what millions of American Moms do when they want to protect their children. It’s their country, after all.

But, beyond keeping young Wang and Billy safe from smut and demented paedophiliacs, Google is, as Declan McCullough reports at searchenginewatch.com, practicing a self-censorship in the service of China that sounds to be a pathetic, pre-emptive kow-towing taken to the extreme. Covetous as they are for China’s more than 110,000,000 internet users, Google has proved itself a depressing affirmation of the moral bankruptcy endemic in the modern world. Theirs is a surrnender to profit preceded to it’s ultimate conclusion, by rival Yahoo ratting out a Chinese journalist, effectively fingering him to take a ten year prison sentence. Today he languishes in one of the Chinese prisons you won’t find at Google.cn.

The citizens of China and the United States, Iraq, and Iran, are in in the middle of the battle for oil and information. It's a battle fast coming home, and reverberating around the planet. Those “filters” and spy technologies are coming back across the Pacific; along with an entrenching of the attitude that allowed the spawn of this new kind of totalitarianism in Asia. It's what the Bush administration once called 'Total Information Awareness, and it's coming on strong in China and everywhere.

Chris Cook is a contributing editor to PEJ News, and hosts Gorilla Radio, a weekly pubic affairs program, broad/webcast from CFUV Radio, at the University of Victoria, Canada. You can check out the GR Blog here.

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

PEJ News - C. L. Cook - Unsurprisingly, some of Stephen Harper's biggest fans are fanatical "culture warriors," who feel little need for the quaint notions of truth and justice. Witness Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation. What the FCF hopes to "free" the American congress from is the fetter of the last hundred and some-odd years of political progress. And Mr. Weyrich would like to see the same liberties taken with Canadian progress.

Typical of the moral fibre of the man credited with coining the term 'moral majority,' Weyrich denied, in the tense days leading to the election, authoring the memo, instead fingering an over-zealous underling for the faux pas. A denial he doesn't bother to make now his philosophical protege is in power.

Late last week, with his P.M. of choice firmly ensconced, Weyrich took another stab at the Canadian body-politick, suggesting years of "cultural Marxism" has rendered Canadians too "liberal" and "hedonistic" to adopt the enlightened views of he and his friends, yet. But, Stephen's good friend still holds out hope Canadians will over time see the err of their ways and come to reject Marxist ideals like same-sex marriage and abortion on demand.

If Weyrich worried Canadians may be worried about affiliations between he, his ilk and a national leadership hopeful, he has shown more political astuteness than too many voters here. What Harper represents, if at arm's length is precisely the pseudo-religiosity infecting, perhaps fatally, the American Republic.

But, as Weyrich's own FCF explains; "Our movement will be entirely destructive, and entirely constructive. We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them." In the case of the United States of America, their program is, as George W. Bush may say, 'Mission Accomplished.'

What gives Paul Weyrich hope that Stephen Harper can overcome Canada's laxity of character is the great unilateral power of the Canadian Prime Minister's office, unlike its U.S. counterpart, to make appointments to the judiciary and in other areas of governance vital to a program of cultural adjustment.

The packing of the courts with fellow-travellers in Canada as seen in the recent history of the United States is, as the Canadian website, Benedictionblogson.com observes, something that should scare all Canadians concerned about preserving their traditions and culture, however "Marxist" it may seem to some outside our borders.

Chris Cook is a contributing editor to PEJ News. He also hosts Gorilla Radio, a weekly public affairs program, broad/webcast from the University of Victoria, Canada. You can check out the GR Blog here.

Only bimbos believed Bush when he said it was WMD's that made him attack, invade, occupy and massacre Iraq. Most of us thought it was to steal Iraq's oil, but we were only partly right. What totally terrorized the tyrannical Texan tycoon was when Saddam played the oil bourse card in November, 2000.

When Saddam started selling Iraqi oil in euro's, he jeopardized greenback hegemony as the world's supreme foreign exchange transaction currency. If this brilliant idea catches on, it will trigger the total collapse of the USA economy. The oil grab is a sideshow. The main feature is the oil bourse.

The Neocon global domination agenda is engendered by the denomination of global oil transactions in greenbacks. America prints out the bucks that are required for the purchase of oil, and the world has to produce stuff they can sell to get the bucks they need to buy oil. Printing Monopoly 'fiat' money only costs America the paper and green ink, so the USA dollar has been fattened on oil-enriched chicken feed since Tricky Dick delinked the buck from the bullion.

The oil bourse scheme could so seriously setback US suzeiranty that Saddam got stomped to smithereens. Krassimir Petrov, who teaches international finance in Bulgaria's American University, warns "should the Iranian Oil Bourse gain momentum, it will be eagerly embraced by major economic powers and will precipitate the demise of the dollar."

Saddam was just the first wavelet in the coming tsunami. On March 20, 2006, Iran will start selling oil in euros.

"At present the United States faces no global rival. America's grand strategy should be to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible. There are, however, potentially powerful states [read Europe, China, India] who are dissatisfied with the current situation and who wish to change it, if they can, in directions that would endanger the relatively peaceful, prosperous and free condition the world [read USA] enjoys today.

Up to now, they have been deterred from doing so by the capability and global presence of American military power [read terrorist menace]. But as that power declines, [read currently being defeated in Iraq] relatively and absolutely, the happy conditions that follow from it will be inevitably undermined."

The latest Neocon ramp-up rhetoric for attacking Iran is a dreary fearmongering rerun of the same old lies that launched Bush's disastrous Iraq-attack. The same old WMD drumbeat is now rattling to attack and destroy Ahmadinejad's nascent civilian nuclear program.

Bush will fail to get IAEA support to forward his Iran-sanctions feint to the UN Security Council, so there won't be any UN 'coalition of the willing.' Russia and China aren't interested, and Bush's Ambassador to India, David Mulford, has just ruined the nuclear carrot that Bush so carefully waved at India to get them to toe the US line. India has its nukes already, and hooking up the pipeline with Iran is more to their interest. This all makes a preemptive American or Israeli attack all the more likely, and the Neocon's insane desperation is such, that such an attack might just go nuclear.

Bush has stated that "All options are on the table.The use of force is the last option for any president. You know we have used force in the recent past to secure our country."

Newt Gingrich, who won't rule out a run for the presidency in '08, said, "If we don't have a very serious systematic program to replace the government of Iran, we're going to live in an unbelievably dangerous world. This is 1935 and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is as close to Adolf Hitler as we've seen."

Israel's Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said that Israel was preparing to protect itself if international diplomatic efforts failed to convince Iran to give up its nuclear program.

When the Neocons conquered the White House in 2000, the U.S. surplus was approximately $5 trillion. That's all gone and the domestic deficit now stands at somewhere around $500 billion. The world's largest debtor nation owes $8,193,150,090,487.56 as of this morning, and the American debt is mushrooming by over a billion a day. Foreigners hold 48 percent of the U.S. Treasury bond market, 24 percent of the U.S. corporate bond market and 20 percent of all U.S. corporations. With "W" walloping US whack like that, why in the world would anyone want dollars?

"Oil can be bought from OPEC only if you have dollars. Non-oil producing countries, such as most underdeveloped countries and Japan, first have to sell their goods to earn dollars with which they can purchase oil. If they cannot earn enough dollars, then they have to borrow dollars from the WB/IMF, which has to be paid back, with interest, in dollars. This creates a great demand for dollars outside the U.S. In contrast, the U.S. only has to print dollar bills in exchange for goods.

For its own oil imports, the U.S. can print dollar bills without exporting or selling its goods. For instance, in 2003 the current U.S. account deficit and external debt has been running at more than $500 billion. Put in simple terms, the U.S. will receive $500 billion more in goods and services from other countries than it will provide them. The imported goods are paid by printing dollar bills, i.e., "fiat" dollars."

Here's the Neocons worst nightmare:

China has more than $800 billion reserved in a giant stack of basically green, ink-smeared paper. When Iran starts selling its oil in euros, why wouldn't China just go ahead and convert that stack of paper to euros and use real money to buy oil instead?

In January 2002, Canada unloaded nearly 20% of its gold stocks in exchange for euros, thereby bringing its euro holdings to the equivalent of about US$14 billion. That's about 42 percent of the total US$33 billion in foreign deposits and securities held by the government. Just 2 years previous, euros accounted for the equivalent of about US$7 billion of Canada's reserves, only 23 percent of the total. The gold sale reduced Canada's U.S. dollar share to 55 percent from 75 percent.

Under Hugo Chavez, Venezuela is brokering barter deals for trading oil with 12 Latin American countries thereby cutting out the USA cut. At the OPEC summit in September 2000, Chavez delivered the report of the "International Seminar on the Future of Energy ." One of its key recommendations was that "OPEC take advantage of high-tech electronic barter and bi-lateral exchanges of its oil with its developing country customers." That would be the end of dollar hegemony over OPEC oil transactions.

The War Resisters League calculates that the cost of the US military runs about $643 billion annually. This obscene military expenditure, which supercedes the total of all other combined global military expenditures, is responsible for 80% of the American debt. When the world stops propping up the debt-ridden USA dollar, that will end the Neocon global domination project and the world's worst terrorist menace. This much, "W" clearly understands, and so too, apparently, do his quisling war-mongering Democrat counterparts.

The Neocon oil-mens cabal has an even clearer understanding of Peak Oil, and its equally ominous implications for the American economy. This quote from Investment Banker Matthew Simmons -a key advisor to the Bush Administration and Cheney's 2001 Energy Task Force and the Council on Foreign Relations: "What peaking does mean, in energy terms, is that once you've peaked, further growth in supply, is over. Peaking is generally, also, a relatively quick transition to a relatively serious decline at least on a basin by basin basis. And the issue then, is the world's biggest serious question."

In this horrific context, it's not too difficult to understand why the Bush Neocon cabal is preparing to risk all to go on a global oil-stealing spree, and to attack Iran, perhaps even with nukes. It's also easy to understand the cringing wimp-ass non-response of the Democrats. There's no way America can win, and America's got everything to lose. As Gavin R. Putland puts it, "If this oil-currency-war theory is a delusion, the U.S. administration can easily discredit it -- by declaring that the USA has no objection if oil exports to the Euro Zone are denominated in euros." The crash of the USA economy will wreak global economic catastrophe.

Paradoxically, that crash is this world's only hope for evading global ecological catastrophe. We should support Iran's oil bourse. Bring it on!

Ingmar Lee is a Canadian freelance writer currently living in Pondicherry India. He is appalled and embarrassed that Canada has elected a Bush-lackey Neocon creep for Prime Minister. He can be reached at ingmarz@gmail.com

http://www.truthdig.com

Posted on Jan. 24, 2006

By Gore Vidal

While contemplating the ill-starred presidency of G.W. Bush, I looked about for some sort of divine analogy. As usual, when in need of enlightenment, I fell upon the Holy Bible, authorized King James version of 1611; turning by chance to the Book of Jonah, I read that Jonah, who, like Bush, chats with God, had suffered a falling out with the Almighty and thus became a jinx dogged by luck so bad that a cruise liner, thanks to his presence aboard, was about to sink in a storm at sea. Once the crew had determined that Jonah, a passenger, was the jinx, they threw him overboard and—Lo!—the storm abated. The three days and nights he subsequently spent in the belly of a nauseous whale must have seemed like a serious jinx to the digestion-challenged whale who extruded him much as the decent opinion of mankind has done to Bush.

Originally, God wanted Jonah to give hell to Nineveh, whose people, God noted disdainfully, “cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand,” so like the people of Baghdad who cannot fathom what democracy has to do with their destruction by the Cheney-Bush cabal. But the analogy becomes eerily precise when it comes to the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico at a time when a president is not only incompetent but plainly jinxed by whatever faith he cringes before. Witness the ongoing screw-up of prescription drugs. Who knows what other disasters are in store for us thanks to the curse he is under? As the sailors fed the original Jonah to a whale, thus lifting the storm that was about to drown them, perhaps we the people can persuade President Jonah to retire to his other Eden in Crawford, Texas, taking his jinx with him. We deserve a rest. Plainly, so does he. Look at Nixon’s radiant features after his resignation! One can see former President Jonah in his sumptuous library happily catering to faith-based fans with animated scriptures rooted in “The Simpsons.”

Not since the glory days of Watergate and Nixon’s Luciferian fall has there been so much written about the dogged deceits and creative criminalities of our rulers. We have also come to a point in this dark age where there is not only no hero in view but no alternative road unblocked. We are trapped terribly in a now that few foresaw and even fewer can define despite a swarm of books and pamphlets like the vast cloud of locusts which dined on China in that ’30s movie “The Good Earth.”

I have read many of these descriptions of our fallen estate, looking for one that best describes in plain English how we got to this now and where we appear to be headed once our good Earth has been consumed and only Rapture is left to whisk aloft the Faithful. Meanwhile, the rest of us can learn quite a lot from “Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire” by Morris Berman, a professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

I must confess that I have a proprietary interest in anyone who refers to the United States as an empire since I am credited with first putting forward this heretical view in the early ’70s. In fact, so disgusted with me was a book reviewer at Time magazine that as proof of my madness he wrote: “He actually refers to the United States as an empire!” It should be noted that at about the same time Henry Luce, proprietor of Time, was booming on and on about “The American Century.” What a difference a word makes!

Berman sets his scene briskly in recent history. “We were already in our twilight phase when Ronald Reagan, with all the insight of an ostrich, declared it to be ‘morning in America’; twenty-odd years later, under the ‘boy emperor’ George W. Bush (as Chalmers Johnson refers to him), we have entered the Dark Ages in earnest, pursuing a short-sighted path that can only accelerate our decline. For what we are now seeing are the obvious characteristics of the West after the fall of Rome: the triumph of religion over reason; the atrophy of education and critical thinking; the integration of religion, the state, and the apparatus of torture—a troika that was for Voltaire the central horror of the pre-Enlightenment world; and the political and economic marginalization of our culture…. The British historian Charles Freeman published an extended discussion of the transition that took place during the late Roman empire, the title of which could serve as a capsule summary of our current president: "The Closing of the Western Mind." Mr. Bush, God knows, is no Augustine; but Freeman points to the latter as the epitome of a more general process that was underway in the fourth century: namely, ‘the gradual subjection of reason to faith and authority.’ This is what we are seeing today, and it is a process that no society can undergo and still remain free. Yet it is a process of which administration officials, along with much of the American population, are aggressively proud.” In fact, close observers of this odd presidency note that Bush, like his evangelical base, believes he is on a mission from God and that faith trumps empirical evidence. Berman quotes a senior White House adviser who disdains what he calls the “reality-based” community, to which Berman sensibly responds: “If a nation is unable to perceive reality correctly, and persists in operating on the basis of faith-based delusions, its ability to hold its own in the world is pretty much foreclosed.”

Berman does a brief tour of the American horizon, revealing a cultural death valley. In secondary schools where evolution can still be taught too many teachers are afraid to bring up the subject to their so often un-evolved students. “Add to this the pervasive hostility toward science on the part of the current administration (e.g. stem-cell research) and we get a clear picture of the Enlightenment being steadily rolled back. Religion is used to explain terror attacks as part of a cosmic conflict between Good and Evil rather than in terms of political processes.... Manichaeanism rules across the United States. According to a poll taken by Time magazine fifty-nine percent of Americans believe that John’s apocalyptic prophecies in the Book of Revelation will be fulfilled, and nearly all of these believe that the faithful will be taken up into heaven in the ‘Rapture.’

“Finally, we shouldn’t be surprised at the antipathy toward democracy displayed by the Bush administration…. As already noted, fundamentalism and democracy are completely antithetical. The opposite of the Enlightenment, of course, is tribalism, groupthink; and more and more, this is the direction in which the United States is going…. Anthony Lewis who worked as a columnist for the New York Times for thirty-two years, observes that what has happened in the wake of 9/11 is not just the threatening of the rights of a few detainees, but the undermining of the very foundation of democracy. Detention without trial, denial of access to attorneys, years of interrogation in isolation—these are now standard American practice, and most Americans don’t care. Nor did they care about the revelation in July 2004 (reported in Newsweek), that for several months the White House and the Department of Justice had been discussing the feasibility of canceling the upcoming presidential election in the event of a possible terrorist attack.” I suspect that the technologically inclined prevailed against that extreme measure on the ground that the newly installed electronic ballot machines could be so calibrated that Bush would win handily no matter what (read Rep. Conyers’ report (.pdf file) on the rigging of Ohio’s vote).

Meanwhile, the indoctrination of the people merrily continues. “In a ‘State of the First Amendment Survey’ conducted by the University of Connecticut in 2003, 34 percent of Americans polled said the First Amendment ‘goes too far’; 46 percent said there was too much freedom of the press; 28 percent felt that newspapers should not be able to publish articles without prior approval of the government; 31 percent wanted public protest of a war to be outlawed during that war; and 50 percent thought the government should have the right to infringe on the religious freedom of ‘certain religious groups’ in the name of the war on terror.”

It is usual in sad reports like Professor Berman’s to stop abruptly the litany of what has gone wrong and then declare, hand on heart, that once the people have been informed of what is happening, the truth will set them free and a quarter-billion candles will be lit and the darkness will flee in the presence of so much spontaneous light. But Berman is much too serious for the easy platitude. Instead he tells us that those who might have struck at least a match can no longer do so because shared information about our situation is meager to nonexistent. Would better schools help? Of course, but, according to that joyous bearer of ill tidings, the New York Times, many school districts are now making sobriety tests a regular feature of the school day: apparently opium derivatives are the opiate of our stoned youth. Meanwhile, millions of adult Americans, presumably undrugged, have no idea who our enemies were in World War II. Many college graduates don’t know the difference between an argument and an assertion (did their teachers also fail to solve this knotty question?). A travel agent in Arizona is often asked whether or not it is cheaper to take the train rather than fly to Hawaii. Only 12% of Americans own a passport. At the time of the 2004 presidential election 42% of voters believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. One high school boy, when asked who won the Civil War, replied wearily, “I don’t know and I don’t care,” echoing a busy neocon who confessed proudly: “The American Civil War is as remote to me as the War of the Roses.”

We are assured daily by advertisers and/or politicians that we are the richest, most envied people on Earth and, apparently, that is why so many awful, ill-groomed people want to blow us up. We live in an impermeable bubble without the sort of information that people living in real countries have access to when it comes to their own reality. But we are not actually people in the eyes of the national ownership: we are simply unreliable consumers comprising an overworked, underpaid labor force not in the best of health: The World Health Organization rates our healthcare system (sic—or sick?) as 37th-best in the world, far behind even Saudi Arabia, role model for the Texans. Our infant mortality rate is satisfyingly high, precluding a First World educational system. Also, it has not gone unremarked even in our usually information-free media that despite the boost to the profits of such companies as Halliburton, Bush’s wars of aggression against small countries of no danger to us have left us well and truly broke. Our annual trade deficit is a half-trillion dollars, which means that we don’t produce much of anything the world wants except those wan reports on how popular our Entertainment is overseas. Unfortunately the foreign gross of “King Kong,” the Edsel of that assembly line, is not yet known. It is rumored that Bollywood—the Indian film business—may soon surpass us! Berman writes, “We have lost our edge in science to Europe...The US economy is being kept afloat by huge foreign loans ($4 billion a day during 2003). What do you think will happen when America’s creditors decide to pull the plug, or when OPEC members begin selling oil in euros instead of dollars?...An International Monetary Fund report of 2004 concluded that the United States was ‘careening toward insolvency.’ ” Meanwhile, China, our favorite big-time future enemy, is the number one for worldwide foreign investments, with France, the bete noire of our apish neocons, in second place.

Well, we still have Kraft cheese and, of course, the death penalty.

Berman makes the case that the Bretton-Woods agreement of 1944 institutionalized a system geared toward full employment and the maintenance of a social safety net for society’s less fortunate—the so-called welfare or interventionist state. It did this by establishing fixed but flexible exchange rates among world currencies, which were pegged to the U.S. dollar while the dollar, for its part, was pegged to gold. In a word, Bretton-Woods saved capitalism by making it more human. Nixon abandoned the agreement in 1971, which started, according to Berman, huge amounts of capital moving upward from the poor and the middle class to the rich and super-rich.

Mr. Berman spares us the happy ending, as, apparently, has history. When the admirable Tiberius (he has had an undeserved bad press), upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. “Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?” He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: “How eager you are to be slaves.” I often think of that wise emperor when I hear Republican members of Congress extolling the wisdom of Bush. Now that he has been caught illegally wiretapping fellow citizens he has taken to snarling about his powers as “a wartime president,” and so, in his own mind, he is above each and every law of the land. Oddly, no one in Congress has pointed out that he may well be a lunatic dreaming that he is another Lincoln but whatever he is or is not he is no wartime president. There is no war with any other nation...yet. There is no state called terror, an abstract noun like liar. Certainly his illegal unilateral ravaging of Iraq may well seem like a real war for those on both sides unlucky enough to be killed or wounded, but that does not make it a war any more than the appearance of having been elected twice to the presidency does not mean that in due course the people will demand an investigation of those two irregular processes. Although he has done a number of things that under the old republic might have got him impeached, our current system protects him: incumbency-for-life seats have made it possible for a Republican majority in the House not to do its duty and impeach him for his incompetence in handling, say, the natural disaster that befell Louisiana.

The founders thought two-year terms for members of the House was as much democracy as we’d ever need. Therefore, there was no great movement to have some sort of recall legislation in the event that a president wasn’t up to his job and so had lost the people’s confidence between elections. But in time, as Ecclesiastes would say, all things shall come to pass and so, in a kindly way, a majority of the citizens must persuade him that he will be happier back in Crawford pruning Bushes of the leafy sort while the troops not killed or maimed will settle for simply being alive and in one piece. We may be slaves but we are not unreasonable.

One way that a majority of citizens can help open the road back to Crawford is by heeding the call of a group called the World Can’t Wait (see their website, worldcantwait.org). They believe that the agenda for 2006 must not be set by the Bush gang but by the people taking independent mass political action.

On Jan. 31, the night of Bush’s next State of the Union address, they have called for people in large cities and small towns all across the country to join in noisy rallies to make the demand that “Bush Step Down” the message of the day. At 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, just as Bush starts to speak, people can make a joyful noise and figuratively drown out his address. Then on the following Saturday, Feb. 4, converge in front of the White House with the same message: Please step down and take your program with you.

The triumph of Hamas in democratic elections can be attributed to several factors including the failures of Fatah, the unilateral and oppressive polices of Israel, and the lack of success in the history of U.S. and European intercessions. If Israel is sensible, says Patrick Seale, it will talk with the newly-aligned Palestinian leadership.

Although last week's Palestinian elections were widely recognised as a model of democracy -- even though conducted in the difficult circumstances of an Israeli military occupation -- the immediate Western and Israeli reaction to the spectacular victory of Hamas has been one of rejection.

The United States and several European countries have said they would stop all aid to the already-bankrupt Palestinian Authority if it were to be controlled or dominated by Hamas, unless Hamas renounced violence and recognised Israel's right to exist.

Is this a sensible reaction to the rise of the militant Islamic movement? Or is it yet another example of Western -- and Israeli -- blindness to the political evolution of the Middle East?

In seeking to explain the emergence of Hamas as the leading force in Palestinian politics, some analysts have pointed to the exhaustion, corruption and incompetence of Fatah, the national movement which has dominated Palestinian politics since the mid-1960s. This is certainly part of the answer. In contrast to Fatah, Hamas has shown itself to be disciplined, dynamic and honest, and has built a network of social services which has gone some way to alleviate the hardship of a population under harsh Israeli occupation.

Other observers have noted that the so-called 'peace process', conducted under American auspices since the Madrid peace conference of 1991, has yielded nothing of substance to the Palestinians. On the contrary, Israel's expansion into the occupied West Bank has continued relentlessly. In 1991, there were fewer than 100,000 Israeli settlers on the West Bank. Today, there are 260,000, and a further 200,000 in and around Arab East Jerusalem.

Fatah has been powerless to stop Israel's massive encroachments or to protect the Palestinian people, which also goes some way to explain the rise of an armed resistance movement such as Hamas.

But there is another important factor which the West has been reluctant to recognise. Notorious for its suicide bombings of Israeli targets, Hamas is in fact a reaction to Israel's policy of continued state violence against the Palestinians and their leaders.

It is a truism that violence breeds violence; that state terror and the terrorism of armed groups are mirror-images of each other.

U.S. President George W. Bush has called on Hamas to renounce violence and recognise Israel's right to exist, but he failed to call on Israel to renounce state terror and to recognise a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem. One appeal is useless without the other.

The Israelis maintain that there is no moral equivalence between their own state violence and the violence of their opponents. But the truth is that murder is murder, whether it is perpetrated by the Israeli state, by an Israeli settler, or by a resistance movement such as Hamas.

What the violence and counter-violence illustrate is that, in the asymmetric warfare between Israel and the Palestinians, non-state actors like Hamas -- and Hizballah in Lebanon -- are seeking to establish a system of mutual deterrence with Israel. Their message is: If you kill us, we will kill you!

Israel's policy has been to eliminate Hamas by killing its leaders, but the election results have proved this policy to be counter-productive.

Sheikh Yassin, a paraplegic in a wheel-chair, was killed by an Israeli missile. Dr Rantisi, Yassin's successor as leader, was also assassinated. Other Hamas leaders fared somewhat better. Khaled Mashaal survived an assassination attempt by Israeli agents in Jordan in 1997. The Israelis bombed the home of Mahmud Zahar in Gaza City in 2003, killing his son and crippling his wife. Muhammmad Deif, head of the Hamas military wing, is said to have been partially blinded and crippled by an Israeli assassination attempt in 2003.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. Scores of lesser figures have been assassinated or rounded up. Yet the movement today dominates Palestinian politics. Israel and its Western allies will have to deal with it, whether they like it or not.

As Khaled Mashaal explained at a press conference in Damascus on Saturday, Hamas policy is to protect the Resistance, to free prisoners from Israeli jails, to reform Palestinian institutions, to express and fight for Palestinian aspirations, and to cooperate with Arab, Islamic and international partners. Resistance, he declared, was a national right, so long as Palestinians were under occupation.

To those who called for Hamas to disarm, Mashaal said that the movement was prepared to form a Palestinian national army, in which all Palestinian forces would be merged.

The point is that the triumph of Hamas marks a Palestinian wakening -- a closing of Palestinian ranks around a responsible but militant programme. If Israel is sensible, it will deal with this revitalised Palestinian movement by dialogue, negotiation and concession, rather than by brute force, because force alone will not give Israel security.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.

Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for The Nation and The American Prospect, as well as expert commentary by William Beeman, Richard Bulliet, Juan Cole, Mark Hertsgaard, Rami G. Khouri, Patrick Seale and Immanuel Wallerstein.